Directed by Oz Perkins
Language: English
Year: 2024
Shaun’s Rating: 2.2/5 ★
Before Watching:
Do you remember that scene from Legally Blonde where Elle takes pity on an awkward classmate floundering his way through a conversation with two pretty women? She decides to intervene, slapping him and chastising his radio silence after providing her with the “greatest pleasure” she’d ever known? Well, that actor was Oz Perkins, who has recently returned to his roots1 to write and direct the blockbuster horror flick Longlegs (which has been successful enough to be crowned as Neon’s highest-grossing domestic film of all time). Some Psycho nepo-babies go on to make you shit your pants in terror, while others go on to make you shit your pants with Activia yogurt.2
Longlegs follows young and gifted FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) in her pursuit of a satanic serial killer across the Pacific Northwest. The case is a string of mysterious murders dating back twenty years, each fitting an unsettling pattern: families killed with no evidence of a perpetrator present, cryptic notes left behind, and dates that center around the birthdays of the victims’ daughters. The killer goes only by the moniker “Longlegs,” played by Nicolas Cage in several pounds of prosthetics and makeup that leave him looking like Jon Travolta’s character in Hairspray if she were fished out of the Hudson river. I guess the unbearable weight of massive talent has taken a toll on him, at least enough to make him resemble a deep sea squid that was rushed to the surface without time to depressurize.
The advertisements for the film were certainly charitable. As David Sims teases in The Atlantic:
Though Longlegs has plenty of atmospheric scares, it never descends into total surreality, instead charting a path between vibes and rules. It’s The Silence of The Lambs meets Hereditary, a tale of a serial killer who is being tracked by the FBI that weaves in some satanic panic and inexplicable psychic power.
He’s hardly the first critic to draw the comparison to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which I think doesn’t have much of a leg (of any length) to stand on. Aside from the shared headline of “female FBI agent tracks down serial killer”, the films are very different stylistically and thematically—are some reviewers just falling prey to the power of suggestion now that Trump keeps inexplicably bringing up the “late, great Hannibal Lecter”?
I’ll admit that Longlegs is very effective at crafting suspense, but the film falls flat after the first 45 minutes. The movie doesn’t show any interest in finishing the procedural once the supernatural Twin Peaks-meets-Stephen King construction winds up. Any plot cohesion gets lost in the sauce of recycled horror tropes, which legs the question as to why they let the story get clobbered by Nicolas Cage’s preposterous character acting.
Pop horror has seen a resurgence in the past few years with fresh visionaries like Kyle Edward Ball (Skinamarink) and Brandon Cronenberg3 (Infinity Pool), but they’ve succeeded because of new ideas—rehashing 1990s motifs won’t be enough to bolster an underdeveloped plot. And when it comes to Nic Cage’s portrayal, maybe this time he should just keep the Face/Off.
Longlegs premiered in Los Angeles in July and is now available in select theaters and Apple TV.
After Watching:
I’m predisposed to roll my eyes at any deus ex machina, but a diabolus ex machina is even cringier. Perkins opened the film with an eerie question and closed it with the most underwhelming, glib answer possible: the devil just, like, made them do it. Yeah, the “man downstairs” was just Geppetto-ing these family men into Casey Anthony.
Did we really need that much footage of Bill Clinton’s headshot (and Nixon’s during a flashback, which was for some reason in someone’s home?) just to establish the decade? Why not just show Harker flipping on an episode of MTV’s The Real World4 while neglecting a Tamagotchi pet? Or asking her stylist for the “Rachel Green”?
The final few twists were visible from the halfway point, and they were a tremendous let-down. Considering how much Nic Cage sucks the life out of the finale, I’d argue he still hasn’t moved on from Renfield—I guess you can’t make an omelette without long-ing a few legs. Why does the Cage(d) bird sing? Apparently, for a sick thrill he can only find by committing homicide, or stealing the Declaration of Independence…
His first acting credit was young Norman Bates in Psycho II (1983).
Yeah, yeah, I know she won an Oscar, but still…
Brandon has targeted a different corner of the horror market than his father David Cronenberg, whose latest film The Shrouds was discussed in our Cannes 2024 coverage.
I’m waiting for the next Chuck Klosterman essay on how Longlegs perfectly encapsulates the mediocrity of ’90s reality TV or something similarly ludicrous.